5G expected from 2020

As EE would surely tell you, 4G is so 2012 darling, which is right, because Huawei is predicting that 5G networks will start to spring into action around the world from the year 2020.

According to Huawei, the Chinese company has been building and selling network infrastructure for over 25 years and is the backbone for a lot of mobile phone networks around the globe already. We've got no choice either as we need to "sustain the continuous growth of wireless business, and to support the industry’s response the 'Big Data' challenge."

If that's not enough to start to get you worried about how the current phone networks are going to cope with your YouTube habit, Huawei also believes that:

"Over the next decade we will witness a 1,000-times increase in the demand for wireless capacity; a range of exciting new business opportunities to connect billions of things wirelessly will emerge and radio access capability will ultimately allow every person to access the wireless network at a speed of 10Gbit per second, 100 times faster than the fastest mobile device on the market today."

But it's okay, the company has a plan. Researchers at Huawei’s 2012 Laboratories are looking at a number of ways to get 5G into our phones including actively participating in and driving broader industry eco-system collaborations. One such collaboration is called the METIS project.

Co-funded by the European Commission as an Integrated Project under the Seventh Framework Programme for research and development (FP7), more than 140 researchers from industry, carriers and universities are already meeting up to crack the foundational technologies that will enable 5G wireless to come about. Thank goodness.

Beyond that, Huawei says it is also "working on prototyping and have conducted field trials on cloud-based radio access networks (so called Cloud-RAN)".

Yep, yet another buzzword to slip into the conversation next time you are chatting to your mates over a pint.

The news follows earlier breakthroughs from Samsung. In May it said that it had successfully developed the beginnings of its 5G network technology, slated eventually to outpace the 4G networks we've come to know in recent years. According to Yonhap News Agency, Samsung has publicly stated that it wants to make 5G available to the masses by the year 2020.

Others have already given 5G testing, but Samsung seems to be making some serious progress in this space. The mobile phone giant is said to have reached speeds of 1Gbps in testing, with the overall potential of 10Gbps as the technology advances. To compare, the Google Fiber Internet service everyone has been drooling about is 1Gbps.